It occurred to me recently that the lyrics from The Rocky Horror Picture Show were applicable... ‘with a bit of a mind flip, you’re into the time slip’ and before I knew it a month had slipped away - and we’re off to Spain tomorrow! So here goes... It’s probably not officially summer in Bucharest yet, in fact to speak to the locals this very hot weather is highly unseasonable indeed this early in the year. But the global warming / extreme weather has j...

Our exile in Bucharest began with a bang on Tuesday (24 April) when we arrived to 29 degrees and discovered that Air Serbia had damaged the towing handle on James’s bag. Somewhat like snails who carry their homes on their backs, our bags are literally our lives and since we had a car waiting (and weren’t sure what to do), we figured ‘sort it out later’. Never, ever sort it out later - turns out we needed to hunt down the baggage handling agent in the los...

No. More. Early. Flights. It's a mantra that we try to live by. A bit like "Never, Ever Pay Retail". We manage the latter much better than the former. By early we mean 8.45 am for a domestic trip from Timisoara to Bucharest (only 1 hr 15 in a prop plane). But we know that on Romanian flights if the check in cut off is 45 minutes prior... then 80% of passengers will turn up at the 55 minutes prior point and security becomes a scrum. We are all in favour of avo...

We have just spent 10 nights in our last Romanian city - Timisoara (Timmy-shwa-rah). We have been vulturing again... culture-vulturing that is (thank you to Marilyn & Dennis in the USA for the new verb). In fact we've been told by another friend that it is possible to overdo culture - be it opera or yoghurt. We have explained to him that we have 3 months coming up in Australia/New Zealand - the sort of tickets we've been paying €10-€20 for between us.....

Cluj Napoca. Apparently it's just me, but the name of our new town (for 7 whole nights) makes me think of Neapolitan icecream. Just sayin' is all. This is in fact 'History City' by Romanian standards. Size wise it is the second largest city both in area and population to Bucharest, but time and development wise, it goes waaaay back. To the Dacians and then, for a short period of only 100 years or so, to the Romans who arrived around 100 AD to snag all the salt...